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design and use

Images can also be formed by light reflected from curved mirrors. This method, long used in astronomical telescopes, is applied to long-focus lens systems of short overall length by folding the light path back onto itself. A
mirror lens or catadioptric system has no chromatic aberrations. Other aberrations are corrected by incorporating one or more appropriate lens elements. The arrangement of...

lighthouses

...the light. By doing this he considerably steepened the angle of incidence at which rays shining up and down could be collected and made to emerge horizontally. Thus emerged the full Fresnel catadioptric system, the basis of all lighthouse lens systems today. To meet the requirement for a fixed all-around light, in 1836 English glassmaker William Cookson modified Fresnel’s principle by...

telescope

...In 1930 Bernhard Schmidt, an optician at the Hamburg Observatory in Bergedorf, Ger., designed a catadioptric telescope that satisfied the requirement of photographing larger celestial areas. A catadioptric telescope design incorporates the best features of both the refractor and the reflector—i.e., it has both reflective and refractive optics. The Schmidt telescope has a spherically...